


Vulnerability

by Littlewhitemouse



Category: Rurouni Kenshin
Genre: M/M, MOSTLY canon compliant but I didn't nitpick, Suicidal Themes, Suicidal Thoughts, do not @ me, dunno how the series ends never got to the end, hurt/comfort???, i feel uncomfortable slapping a label on him idk ptsd for sure, just heavy fucking mental health talk, just literally this whole thing is a man constantly on the edge of splitting from reality, mutual pining???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27256906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littlewhitemouse/pseuds/Littlewhitemouse
Summary: …His mind keeps going back to that library. That damn library. Those bookshelves stacked high in the darkness. Why for heaven’s sake would anyone build a library in the dark?
Relationships: Himura Kenshin/Shinomori Aoshi
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Vulnerability

_ Not a sound, not so much as a shuffle or a hiss. Not the tapping of a finger or the clatter of a blade. Not a word from the shadows, like shadows should be. _

_ The light didn’t shiver its stripes like a tiger rustling through fern fronds in the tiny crack between the two great doors; not a glimmer or a glint came from below them. Nor could it be said Kenshin felt a change in the temperature, the slightest fume of body heat, or caught the scent of oiled steel, sweat, or resin. There was nothing. _

_ There wouldn’t really ever be anything to explain how he knew Shinomori Aoshi was there for him, waiting behind the doors. _

_ Honestly, his regret was that Sanosuke would see this. He trusted (trusts) Sano with his life, but Aoshi… _

_ What was Kenshin trying to say to himself, that Aoshi should be faced alone, that Kenshin would rather do this alone, that Aoshi deserves to have this moment alone, like the family of the deceased deserved their last moment of solitude around the dear remains? _

_ Kenshin wished the two of them were alone for this (at least not trapped below ground in Shishio’s tortured maze) as he turned his back to the path and placed both hands, palms open, on a dead end. The Aoi-ya was burning, he knew, and Kaoru and Yahiko and Misao were fighting for their lives, and Kenshin wished he were alone with Aoshi as he opened the door to his dead end. _

_ But as it turned out, Himura Kenshin was alone. Shinomori Aoshi wasn’t in the building. _

\--

In a library, underground, surrounded by books in the darkness.

Was it his fault for waiting in this horrible place, or Shishio’s fault for needing an underground fucking library?

But why did he wait for the Battousai in this darkness, seeing nothing in the walls of books? And how had it worked, like the hands of a god opened the double doors keeping him in a black library and riffled the pages to find—

Hitokiri Battousai.

How had he ended up in a dark library, he wondered, rising to his feet like he was floating, willing Hitokiri Battousai to find him, and how had he done it? Which of you rascals turned the pages of the book of fate?

\--

Having been insane before, Aoshi relishes having the space to sift things through. That space is time, it is distance, it is light. To make it clear, whatever ‘it’ is, clear as black ink on a white page; lay it open and across the room. Let it rest. Observe slowly, with due caution. He sits in the sunlight now, he loves to have distance. If he can view it from some way away, like a wall scroll, like watching the sunrise, he can know if he’s ‘put’ anything in front of it. If he’s seeing ghosts on it. Misunderstanding the meaning. If he’s turned it into something it isn’t. If he’s being insane. If he can’t read the words, like a dream. 

…His mind keeps going back to that library. That damn library. Those bookshelves stacked high in the darkness. Why for heaven’s sake would anyone build a library in the dark? Sometimes he wished he had read just one of the fucking books, at least tried to remember a title. He looks back in his mind and sees black squiggles, indecipherable, like a dream. Pictures melting in his mind. The four ghosts. Making everything warp through their spectral visages. Hitokiri Battousai.

With proper distance, time, and perspective, you can not be insane anymore. It’s hard to feel like you were ever insane with the morning sun on your face, a cup of tea wafting gentle bitter green through the air.

Hitokiri Battousai wants to join him for a drink.

\--

_ And one more thing, _ fuck why Shishio built it in the first place; who sits in a dark library alone waiting for someone who has no idea you’re there to find you for hours and doesn’t READ A SINGLE BOOK?

He can’t wonder if they were even real. He remembers cutting them up. The bookshelves tumbling down, spilling with a rain of thump, thump, thumps. Doesn’t look so gristly when you’re cleaving paper from spine. The books were real, so was the darkness, so is Hitokiri Battousai, who has just taken his cup of tea in his hands.

Shinomori Aoshi is sitting across from the Battousai about to have a cup of tea with him, after they failed entirely to kill each other, and had some time and space to mull all of it over. He can’t stop thinking about how the Battousai found him in a dark library, like a corpse, behind a shut set of doors, without a movement, a whisper, a tremor.

I suppose that catches us up to speed.

\--

If ever the Battousai uttered the words ‘how have you been,’ it was when he was another man, a war and a lifetime ago. He can smalltalk, and will, but Aoshi hopes he will never hear it. Nor does he want high-culture poetry and tea, nor grisly mutterings of war and politics and the end of the age. He’ll be damned if he knows what he  _ does _ want from him, so Battousai had better have an idea.

Fortunately, the sun is bright today, so bright that when it slides into his cup of tea it illuminates it green. The bitter scent seems to clear his head. Having been insane, he knows the value of something you can sense to ground you. A sight to fixate on, a scent, a sound, something at all to tell you you’re there.

“Misao-dono; that is, the Okashira,” Kenshin begins, to Aoshi’s relief. Yes, yes; he became Kenshin, this ‘Kenshin’ the moment he spoke. 

He praises Misao and does well to do so. Makimachi Misao being Okashira is a better idea than any Aoshi has ever had. Fantastic. He can leave her to her better devices, wash his hands of that place, who he’s been, what he’s done, wash his hands, wash his hands, wash his hands, wash his hands.

…He’s losing track of what Kenshin is saying.

As Kenshin slips in news about the Oniwabanshu between praise of the young people running the ancient organization Aoshi slips into it for a moment, this sensation, odd, circular, unsettling. The sensation of ‘Kenshin’ and ‘Aoshi.’

He still felt he couldn’t know for sure which two men spoke between the four of them, Battousai, Kenshin, Aoshi, and.  _ Him. _

Should he give  _ him _ a name? Time, distance, separation; it might be worthwhile. Whomever Kenshin spoke to in the darkness of the library. The man who planned to kill them both together.  _ Him. _

Between the four of them, only two could be speaking at one time. This sensation of Kenshin and Aoshi was untested and unsettling, and he felt it was reaching as if for his hands, like the table had them too close. A little circle, less than a single step. They were already in close range, perversely, deadly close to be sitting next to either Hitokiri Battousai or. _ Him _ . Frankly, it was a dangerously close range to sit next to Kenshin or Aoshi as well, but neither of those men were likely to suddenly strike you down in a public place. They had accepted peace, and weren’t insane anymore.

“This one wonders, though,” said Kenshin, an airy softness usually reserved for the voices of women, “when Aoshi will come to see the Okashira’s progress.”

“Her progress?” asked Aoshi, somewhat numbly.

“The Okashira is a suitably frightening warrior,” said Kenshin anxiously, reaching for the back of his head. 

Aoshi can well believe that Misao gave Kenshin a few good smacks; she was _ how old  _ now, stronger in form, and in spirit she hadn’t faltered at all. He is also certain that Kenshin has never fought Misao, whether or not Misao has fought him. Perhaps he’s defended himself; perhaps not. Likely, if Misao came for his throat, Kenshin would just crumple onto the ground. The smaller and sweeter the person, the more useless Kenshin was around them. He was the opposite person to the warlords Aoshi remembered so painfully; the weaker you were, the faster they ground you down.

(Aoshi would fancy himself intolerant of becoming a person that Kenshin was weak too, soft and needing a kind touch. He was disarmingly sweet now, like he had scented something in Aoshi, a bee to flower.)

(What was he supposed to do? He was absolutely numb to the will to fight him. Frightened somewhere underneath his mind he observed the sensation of being Kenshin and Aoshi again; a totally unknown dynamic of two inert materials.)

“…I should hope so,” Aoshi finally said, as proud of Misao as he was reluctant to see her in his role. Would Misao have a _ Her _ inside her some day? He couldn’t imagine it. “The defense of the Aoi-ya…” he said, and lost his taste for the sentence.

“Surely safe with the Okashira,” Kenshin replied with a gentle confidence. “How bittersweet,” he continued, “to watch the next generation take up the defense.”

Aoshi closed his eyes briefly. Just as he had been thinking. Had they taught the next generation of warriors how to avoid going insane while feeding the enormously overwhelming, sweetly irresistible call to violence, which is their job? What an insulting question.

He felt a sickly pull to look at Kenshin through his eyes, see the man who it was once life to fight and kill.

The piercing sun brightened his skin. Shut your eyes.

“Kenshin,” he said, and forgot what it was he intended to say next. A little bit of hard fear prickled at him.  _ Had he just said ‘Kenshin’?— _

Yes, Kenshin had the gentle gall to call Aoshi  _ Aoshi  _ all the time, but himself, he had never—

“Yes?” asked Kenshin, a light voice he can’t even quite see past the morning sunbeams, slipping across the table.

Like he had already accepted his name in Aoshi’s mouth, like this wasn’t the first time. Surely it was? He would have never called this man Kenshin in the past. What a shame it was that Aoshi couldn’t remember what it was he was going to say. “—it’s pointless.”

“Ah?”

“To ask you anything,” Aoshi told him. “I know what you’re going to respond with.”

“Is it so…” asked Kenshin quietly, unoffended, as if he was asking a third person at the table.

“You seem to never change your opinion, and your convictions are so sincere,” Aoshi informed him. He was talking to his nails on the table right now, but he meant what he said. “If I ask you any question about the future, ‘do you think these children will take up our old causes,’ ‘when do you think our work will be done,’ ‘when will we be able to die,’ I know the things you’re going to say.”

“—Aoshi intends to die again?” asked Kenshin, almost as if it was an old joke.

In some ways, it was. “Well, not today, not tomorrow,” Aoshi replied tersely, mocking the joke.

“Surely Aoshi—”

“’Has something more to live for,’ ‘should live to atone for his crimes,’ ‘will find his purpose if he waits and reflects,’ ‘will never find his happiness in violence,’ ‘wants to see Misao’s smile again,’” Aoshi informed him, rote. “Does it echo inside your head, Kenshin?”

He said it again. He looked at Kenshin’s face. Warm. A bit of a smile. Kenshin.

“This one is so predictable?—”

“Well,”

“Perhaps this one is a little set in his ways—”

“Not all of us can uncover the secrets of existence at nineteen, give the rest of us a break,” grumbled Aoshi, wondering if and how Kenshin’s easy warmth was leeching into him. Like the darkness of his words was seeping out of his speech. Losing ink. Growing pale.

“This one doesn’t—”

“Yes he does.”

“—Perhaps Aoshi just knows him so well.”

“—”

Hah. Aoshi felt angry about that statement. He felt a little angry and a little comfortable. The accusation of vulnerability, closeness, and even understanding. Such things were once deadly and still held the stench of death to him.

To know one’s enemy as Aoshi knew Kenshin was a weakness you took on yourself only in the pursuit of killing him. If you did not kill him, you came to know him, and know him well, in an unallowable way. He had stalked him around his daily life in Tokyo, learned his martial art and his ways, memorized his emotional states, beliefs, impulses and habits, his speech; how to read him in each moment through each phase, just so he could predict his foot, his arm, his eye when Kenshin finally came for him; survive his final blow and deal him onto him. To take that level of understanding of another man is to take on an absurd vulnerability to him; to carry his soul within you like a second self. It is only permissible if you intend to kill him and banish his spirit, otherwise—

You find yourself sitting across a table with a man you know like yourself but can’t talk to, and he knows you so well he can cut your words into something you don’t recognize.

(As far as Aoshi understood it, Kenshin’s strength was his impossible ability to carry around the hearts of a thousand people he had not killed. The dead are one thing. They will not change. The living? The living can do anything they want to you if you’re not strong enough to stop them.)

“—Might take responsibility for that,” Aoshi muttered, a joke that felt absolutely heavy, like it smacked into the table between their cups of tea.

“…This one doesn’t think he is ready for marriage…”

“You’re thirty-two, and I am thirty,” said Aoshi, vexed and impatient with how easily Kenshin took and continued the absurd line. “And that we are both unmarried is a testament to how unsuited we both are to it.”

“This one will not make a good wife for Aoshi.”

“How do you say all that with a straight face?” asked Aoshi, baffled. Kenshin’s sense of humor was something otherworldly, vague and completely unruffled.

“It’s because this one is a poor cook as well as a bad housekeeper, and cannot bear any children.”

Aoshi swore for patience to several deities and put his face in his hand. “Should I be in pursuit of a wife, Kenshin, I would not be in the position to concern myself with any of that.”

“Then what is necessary of Aoshi’s wife?” asked Kenshin, both amused and curious.

“She would have to be comfortable with the outlaw’s life of crime and violence, because I am a criminal outlaw who can only make my way as a hired blade,” he explained to Kenshin as if to a naive maiden. “Likely she would have to wait for me to appear from time to time, blood-soaked, and hold her tongue to questions.”

“—But she would not be required to cook or to clean or bear children?” Kenshin asked, peering up at the ceiling as if he were weighing his options. “So such a woman could mind her business and be unconcerned with Aoshi’s activities until a time when he see fit to see her again. This one can’t imagine there would be no uninterested women.”

_ This fucking jackass. _ There was nothing he couldn’t make sound good. “If you’re about to offer me an unknown sister or pin an unmarried shrew on me, spare the poor thing my company,” Aoshi threatened.

“Aoshi thinks he is unlikable.”

“…Kenshin, do you really think we’re fit for normal lives, wives, and happiness?”

“…Aoshi—”

“Dammit, I asked you a fucking question again,” Aoshi growled under his breath, keeping the heavy words quiet in this beautiful bright space. “I know, I know what you’ll say already. Anything’s possible. Everyone deserves to seek happiness. All we can do is live on, so on, so on, and on, and on. Is anything not a _ slog _ to you? Is there an end to the race? Ever? Do you really not get tired of this?

“—

“Please, don’t answer that.”

\--

It would be an admirable web, if he were trying to weave it. If Aoshi were trying to do this, he might appreciate what he had done. _ Kenshin, I know it’s not so easy for you as you pretend. I know you feel alone in your darkness, alone in the same body as Hitokiri Battousai and his sins. I know because I see right through you. I am alone too. I think no one can understand me. I think no one could ever stay by my side. _

If Aoshi were trying, he might feel proud of himself. Instead, he feels angry at his weakness and vulnerability and shame and isolation, alone.

\--

What was happening, over the next few days, Aoshi could not tell at first. He knew someone was there, but he didn’t react to being tailed for a little while. Most assassins, stalkers, or informants will peel away from their target quickly. If you don’t immediately aggrieve them, they will return to their bosses or eventually spring on your in ambush, and you have a much easier time sorting the mess out then. Besides, there were only a handful of better-trained stalkers in Japan than himself, and that was one of the only areas left in which he felt confident in being confident.

It took a few days for him to finally understand that the person following him, semi-consistently, here and then gone, not quite detectable and not making a move—it had to be Kenshin. If it wasn’t Kenshin, then it was Hitokiri Battousai. But that thought is (heart-pounding) absurd. There was no reason for the Battousai to be here, suddenly.

And so, all at once he realizes it it’s so obvious, that the wafting, still, ghost-like presence is Kenshin. The signs he is trained to absorb like light in the eyes, patterns of footfalls, the slightest scent, the pressure of malice or interest or battle-instinct, he can tell a man from another by the traces their soul leaves behind. How he knows it is Kenshin he could not succinctly describe, but he can tell it is Kenshin waiting for him, behind the corner, around the wall.

Why follow him, suddenly? On the (exciting) absurd possibility that he wants to fight him… why? It’s much more likely Kenshin wants information, perhaps by order of Misao, perhaps to settle something on his own heart.

If he knows Kenshin so well, why does he not know why Kenshin is following him? It weighs on him like sickness on the gut to think of reasons why Kenshin would follow someone. Care. Concern. Maybe he thinks Aoshi is going to kill himself.

\--

Would Kenshin be the first one to find him if he did?

Almost definitely at this rate, he told a cup of tea, swishing gently on top of a low table. It was one of those days where it felt like his vision kept narrowing down to points, and he couldn’t look away from whatever they pierced; right now, this teacup. He doesn’t know why this happens. It feels like there’s so much behind him.

Maybe he should put them both at peace with. This.

Make Kenshin stop following him.

\--

So he sets up the scene for Kenshin. Open sky. A night without clouds. Not a boxed-in room. Nowhere to hide. Aoshi is in the wilds of the fields, where no window is lit with a candle. The calls of wild animals fill the wind with solitude from men.

Aoshi sits on the ground, completely vulnerable. Head to the dirt. He draws his blade, and he holds it in his hands again, sinfully bewitched by how the starlight glimmers on its silver sides. He doesn’t draw a blade nearly so often any more. He forgot how much attachment he felt to these tools, the glimmer that meant he might live today, the thin slip of metal that had saved his life so many times. The first thing he saw after the struggle to survive was over again, and his harsh breaths were slowing down.

It was silent and clean now, like it had fallen asleep. He found it hard to look away.

So he sat with a blade and waited for Kenshin. This would be irresistible to him, this weakness, a man who looked broken, alone in the dark.

Aoshi sat alone and reflected that he knew exactly the trap to set for Kenshin, exactly the scene that would pull on his heart and make him weak.

Kenshin’s footfalls came steady and gentle to him over the unfarmed fields and Aoshi hated his victory.

How did he find him? How did Aoshi know how to call him? How did they know each other like this? The answer is this: at this point, how could they fail each other?

It was in this mood of terrifying honesty that he told Kenshin, who was near him enough now to hear his voice over the soft hissing grass, “I’m not out here to kill myself,” and sheathed his sword. Kenshin’s footfalls continued to come near him until Aoshi continued, “I did this to call you.”

Then Kenshin stopped, silent, and Aoshi stood, still with his back turned to him. “…I knew you would come.”

Kenshin might have been imaginary, he made no sound over the wind, didn’t find anything to say to him. Yet Aoshi was dead certain it could be him and no one else. “…Just as I knew you would come for me, in a dark room in the mountain, when you had no way or cause to find me there. Kenshin… I want to know. How did you know I was there?...”

Kenshin might have sighed. Aoshi couldn’t quite tell. “…Such a shame…” he finally said, a voice that seeped into Aoshi’s soul like balm. Gods, please tell him, why did that voice feel good? Even though he was causing Kenshin pain, sadistically. “…You have asked this one a question he cannot answer.”

“What, finally?” asked Aoshi, fighting an awful bitterness. He turned around to see Kenshin in the darkness, dressed, armed, still and composed as always. “You knew the pain in my heart, dispensed my salvation, could cure madness and easily realign my foolish misunderstandings of the world, and now I have a question you can’t answer?”

“This one doesn’t know how he knew Aoshi’s presence,” Kenshin told him, both soft and blunt, like a smooth stone. “He felt a presence, which was behind a door no one should have been behind. He thought to himself on who it might be, and he realized, it is Shinomori Aoshi. If this one were to say how he knew that…” Kenshin did really seem to struggle with his words. “…This one would say… of course it was.”

“Of course it was.”

“Of course it was Aoshi behind the door.”

“Of course it was…” Aoshi whispered, feeling dizzy. Who else would it be? Why wouldn’t Kenshin be stuck with him as badly as he was stuck with himself?

“Then may this one ask…” whispered Kenshin, now taking a few careful steps through the grasses to get close enough to Aoshi to spring on him (were that his intent) “after these years, how it was that Aoshi knew this one would find him there?”

“—”

To remember that time is to remember nothing. His mind was a void that sought to obliterate thought, fill it up with blood instead.

“…I did not know you would find me,” Aoshi said, with dreadful certainty. “I was insane. In my madness, bent around revenge, I accepted as truth that I was meant to kill you. I was only waiting for the inevitability of death, as every man does.”

“Powerful madness,” Kenshin told him. “This one could not ignore you though he knew it might be wise.”

“Kenshin—”

“And he had promised, both you and Misao,” Kenshin continued, and the waver in his voice was so slight it might be nothing but a ripple or air, “that the business between Aoshi and this one would not go unfinished, and that this one would not prevail over Aoshi.”

“What do you mean?”

“That Aoshi would not die, or be killed by himself,” Kenshin continued, “that is what was promised to Misao. And this one was sure he had already failed when he saw Aoshi, and knew he was no longer in control of himself.

“So how did this one find Aoshi? He doesn’t know,” Kenshin admitted, his arms crossed uncomfortably, looking to the side, sincerely searching the night for an answer. “Aoshi was not even there. This one simply…” for once, Kenshin faltered at his own words. “…This one felt it must be so.”

With a mounting fear of the wind and fields and great black sky around him, forces greater than humans, gods and spirits, Aoshi sensed the hand of greater powers than the two of them could channel, quitter, and stranger forces that dictated that this would happen, or would not. The sense that something was fully out of control, indecipherable, uncannily inhuman as it acted out humanity through the two of them.

Having been insane, Aoshi knew this was superstition if not paranoia. But what was it that seized both of them, Aoshi and Kenshin, and made it so that they would become unmistakable and unignorable to each other? How had this fate been wrought?

“What is happening, between you and me?” asked Aoshi, numbly.

Kenshin looked like Aoshi was saying something insane. He hoped he wasn’t. The night suddenly felt so clear and sharp. “Has Himura Kenshin been in my life so long? When did you get here?”

Kenshin was again wordless, tracing Aoshi’s face; not his hands or his feet, still not expecting an attack. Why would he? Aoshi was all but powerless to lift a sword now. “…It is like you were suddenly everywhere.”

“…What does Aoshi mean?” asked Kenshin, a small voice.

“Now you’re asking me questions again,” replied Aoshi, helplessly. “How would I know?”

Kenshin’s eyes lowered to the ground, points of white in a great black night. Aoshi was in awe of his pose, how gentle it was; his own too. Both of them wouldn’t be able to defend an attack if it came hollering and blazing right at them. Kenshin looked in this moment like he wouldn’t even know how to draw the sword at his side, feet flat on the ground, shoulders loose, head hung. The most absurd thing about the disaster happening around them is that there was no way it would come to blows.

It was like a new man. It  _ was _ a new man. So was he.

“If Aoshi feels unsettled about the past…” began Kenshin, mulling on his words as he spoke them, “and he would like to settle…”

“Things are settled,” said Aoshi, feeling sadder than he should.

“If he—”

“I’m not out in a field because I’m so in despair about losing to you. I lost, and I deserved to. I would lose again. I’ve thought about our fight a thousand times and each time come to the conclusion I deserved to lose, and all is well in the world. You cut madness out of me and put me back together straight.” He felt like he had been hit by lightning in this field, and the sky was still cloudless. “I want to know how you found me.”

“…”

“And you don’t know.”

“…”

“A library in the darkness…” Aoshi felt ire and sadness rising in him, like it was tapping and scratching him from inside. “Who builds an underground library?”

“Ah…”

“Did Shishio strike you as much of a reader? Honestly,” snapped Aoshi, looking up at the sky as if he thought Shishio Makoto would be up there. Not a chance. 

“Perhaps it belonged to some other of his comrades. Houji struck this one as well-read.”

“The number of books—how much money did they spend on that? Kenshin, I cannot  _ stand  _ thinking about that library.  _ And I didn’t read a single book. _ Not a one. I don’t have a clue what was down there. I could have been surrounded by cookbooks.”

Kenshin snickered at him. It made Aoshi ashamed of how light it made him feel. “Surely Aoshi shouldn’t find such meaning in his choice of rooms.”

“Surely he shouldn’t. But he’s been. I’ve not always. Been in control—” Aoshi cut himself off.

“This one…”Kenshin’s vocal tone shifted soft.

“No, Kenshin,” said Aoshi, face turned down again. “No.”

“…”

“Whatever you’re intending to say…”

“Always, Aoshi silences this one.”

“Because I know what you’re going to say.”

Another silence followed the others, amorphous, like a fight coming to a stalemate. Aoshi could hardly even tell what was being fought over, or what was at stake.

It took some time for Kenshin to take the conversation back.

“…Does Aoshi have a residence in Tokyo?” asked Kenshin softly.

Not in so many words. “I’m paying for my stay,” he said succinctly.

“At an inn?”

Also not exactly. “Employer, more like. Short term.”

Kenshin nods, shifting darkness with his face. “Let this one return Aoshi there.”

Ha. What, would some shifty bandit attack if little Kenshin wasn’t at his side? “Shall I give you my arm as well?” he said, in a way that probably would have sounded more teasing if he hadn’t been dripping with misery-exhaustion inside.

True to form, Kenshin held out his arm anyway, prim face exactly unreadable.

“…No, Kenshin,” said Aoshi again, (though it was indeed so dark now that he couldn’t prove it was still Kenshin. He had no way of knowing and, having no way of knowing, he preferred to think of him as such.)

“Ah, Aoshi doesn’t need led?” a glimmer of humor.

“You don’t know where we’re going,” Aoshi told him, with an implied ‘dumbass.’

Kenshin, who didn’t like to reveal unpleasant truths unprovoked, did not say anything. This told Aoshi that Kenshin did know exactly where they were going, and had pretended not to, to pretend he hadn’t been following him.

But it had been Kenshin behind him, and it had been all along. Through the narrow loud streets of Tokyo, with some invisible agenda on his mind.

\--

The distant countryside becomes more beautiful when you are trying to ignore someone, or racing to think of what to say to them; was the darkness making cuts down the layers of grasses always so dear?

He remembers feeling held and kept secret by darkness as Kenshin’s footfalls oddly echo his own, remembers feeling totally empty, and at peace. Perhaps it didn’t feel much like peace at the time, that crumbling hole that took him up. But how can you not envy a man who lives for one thing and one thing alone? His choices are so simple, and his path is righteous.

It was in silence that Kenshin took Aoshi back to his home, neither one obviously following the rest, unmistakably together all the same. There was a loveliness about the silence, uncomfortable as it was, a loveliness that Aoshi was in no way used to. Things were incomprehensible, and he did not know where Kenshin stood or what was on his mind exactly; because of that, he knew things were not the way they once were.

\--

The rambling way through Tokyo eventually took them to a back door, behind the house of his temporary employer. It was barred with a heavy plank; Aoshi figured that anyone who could lift it and burst in deserved their fair shot. Of course Kenshin did not make any assumptions and waited for Aoshi to lift it himself.

And so Aoshi hefted up the bar with his forearms and shoulder, placed it with a clatter on the cobblestone ground, pulled open the rickety double doors that hid his small room from the rambling streets outside, and turned around in the shadow of the threshold to look at Kenshin.

With the scattered lights of the city (late night candle vigils, early morning cooks and caretakers with lanterns lit, sleepless loners and lovers beside the coals) Aoshi could see him now, a dim lunar glow against the greyness of the street. His cratered face was still unreadable, like he had lost a little feeling since they departed the field, and now stood still, waiting for it to come back.

Kenshin stood in front of him, Aoshi stood in the doorway, wondering what was happening as the time to have said something passed. He placed a hand on the doorjamb while a strange anxiety bloomed in him, like a fungus on his stomach.

“This is it,” said Aoshi, meaning his residence.

“So it is,” said Kenshin, replying without meaning. His eyes didn’t stray to the house behind Aoshi.

Something about this felt very  _ off _ . He felt himself bracing, a tiny seizure in his shoulders, despite the fact that there had been no threat of a fight. Not in Kenshin’s aura, nor through his pose.

Kenshin’s eyes closed and stayed closed, deliberately. Aoshi saw the fingers of his right hand curl slightly and the world slowed down immediately, hollowed out for blood and adrenaline. By the time Kenshin was lifting his hand in the air, reaching out only halfway to Aoshi’s body, his mind was blank and his arms were tight and ready to slash. And for a second he was sick with wanting to lunge at Battousai, trembling like the violence was about to burst out of him.

It wasn’t Kenshin’s godspeed that enabled him to act before Aoshi could react.

Kenshin laid his hand on Aoshi’s cheek, palm to skin, and had to tilt his head up to reach him. He was such a small man, and as time weighed on him, he was even slighter than he once was.

Kenshin kissed him in the quiet of the street, where there was no one but the two of them, nothing else in the darkness. Aoshi was hard as ice as Kenshin leaned onto his toes to reach him, and with a push-pull on Aoshi’s face, moved the two of them together.

He was gentle, Kenshin was, and absolutely firm, a hand curled around his ear to brace Aoshi where he intended him to be, whether Aoshi balked or not. That was the physical language they both had—declaration of intent, staked and reinforced. It would have been hard to move from this grip. And he was gentle, those firm fingers placed precisely where they wouldn’t have to dig in to the soft skin behind his ear to keep him in his place.

Kenshin’s lips were on his own, soft and dry, not so well-used.

Neither were his own. They resisted a little when Kenshin backed away, the very slightest, strangest sting. It seemed to sink into his skin as Kenshin settled back onto his feet.

Aoshi felt like his eyes were being suffused fully with the man he was looking at and it was as if he had never seen him before; a cracked-scarred face, lines of worry on his brow, a tiny, tired frame, which was never tall, never large, never imposing. In fact it had been a mistake (if not a delusion) to see him as intimidating all along; not because he wasn’t powerful and skilled, but because it was a disservice to the man inside.

“If—” said Kenshin, a voice that was so carefully controlled it was miserable.

“Why would you—” said Aoshi and cut himself off. He realized he sounded angry. For a moment overwhelmed, he ducked further into his room, his face turned away, but his hand not taken from the doorjamb. 

Having been insane before. In these situations Aoshi had learned to keep yourself stuck to what you can sense. (The old molded wood of the door. Chittering of late-night insects, calling for mates. The slightest sliver of light that slid past the doorframe into the darkened mat of rushes. The low hollowness of Kenshin’s sigh.)

“Good night,” said Kenshin, surrendering in a single turn. He turned to walk away, and though he was slow Aoshi barely moved in time to snatch at his retreating form. He gripped Kenshin’s arm and stopped him as he stood.

Kenshin didn’t yet turn to him, but in his profile Aoshi could see the controlled sadness that had compelled him to act out in the first place. That resignation—“Where do you think you’re going?”

Now Kenshin turned to him, wary, a quiet echo of the sharp calculation Aoshi had once earned from him as a warrior. “If Shinomori wishes to make his displeasure known—”

“No,” Aoshi snapped, more at the use of his last name and formal speech than at what Kenshin had actually said. He braced Kenshin firmly, disallowing him to move one way or the other, his hand clenched around his forearm. Not nearly so gracefully as Kenshin had held his face. But he didn’t have that deep graciousness in him.

Kenshin regarded him very carefully; they were close enough now for Aoshi to see that there was a pink flush on his cheeks, and it made him react, a flush of quicker blood in his core. It was strange, like he had been woken up from a dream with a snap. “I told you I’m not going to fight you, Kenshin,” he hissed, somewhat stupidly, by his own admission. He only felt himself wanting to snatch the wariness out of Kenshin’s face. He didn’t want to be  _ him _ , not the man who snapped and snarled at affection, not the man fighting Battousai, and he didn’t want to be looking at Battousai. He didn’t want either of them to disappear again.

Kenshin nodded, not less confused but Aoshi could see the nervousness start dripping from his face. His questioning eyes relaxed and Aoshi could see the soft skin that made those wrinkles, the pale flush that colored his cheeks, the nervous purse of his lips relaxing. And he felt.

Aoshi returned his kiss, worse, harsher, less gracefully. He knew it was bad, but it was what he had. He had tilted Kenshin’s head farther, pushed him a little farther back; in consequence, when he pressed his lips to Kenshin’s he parted them slightly and could feel the blunt teeth underneath.

He was mortifyingly relieved that it felt like kissing. It didn’t feel sharp, dirty, horrifying, to have Kenshin’s lips pressed against his; he didn’t feel his spirit shrinking, his masculinity recoiling in disgust. It felt like kissing, warm skin, the twitch of the shock on his face felt through the sensitive pressure of his lips. It was sour and felt sweet, and it was unpleasant to stop.

It was both because of his shocked and respectful silence at the feeling of passion in his own breast—unexpected, unlooked for, and beneficent—and because of the complexity of Kenshin’s expression that he said nothing when they parted again. Aoshi backed himself off, his hand looser, weaker on Kenshin’s arm; Kenshin stood in slight unbalance, not pulled away from Aoshi, not standing quite on his own two feet.

Time passed whisking by; Kenshin’s eyes dropped from Aoshi’s lips to the ground, fluttered closed and back open.

“Aoshi breaks this one’s heart.”

It settled on Aoshi’s heart like a heavy quilt. “I…” he stuttered, halfway between ‘I know’ and ‘I’m sorry.’

“Aoshi’s loneliness, and his suffering, his bitterness,” Kenshin clarified, quietly, not meeting his eyes, “they break this one’s heart. This one was so sad in his heart for you… when…”

Kenshin’s usual clarity failed him. Yet it was like Aoshi could feel it pulsing from his skin, feel it in the warm breath that ghosted on his neck and made his skin prickle. He could feel the compassion that made Kenshin’s heart twist and torture him; how it must have been suffering through Aoshi’s rage.

For years.

“I…” Aoshi couldn’t express it either. He grabbed another kiss like he was stealing it, splitting Kenshin’s lips for a moment. He startled himself, felt how strong a warmth washed over his face. 

How long had Himura Kenshin been under his skin like this? When had he gotten inside him? Had he simply not noticed?

But not at all, he realized, as he saw something almost tight pinch Kenshin’s face as he realized he had been shut up with a kiss, cute and slight. He had in no way been oblivious to his fixation on Kenshin, how horribly, totally he had come to know him in his passion to murder him. And he had been so terribly lost to have that passion on his hands, unable to get rid of it, nothing to be done with it.

Could this be happening? Could things be settled just like this?

It felt insane.

(The barest moonlight that reflected cleanly on Kenshin’s face. The heartbeat inside of his ears, sharp and demanding. The warm air to his back, the last light of coals he had left in the hearth. Things he can feel. Here. Now.)

Standing in the darkness of his open doorway, half dissolved into it, grasping Kenshin’s arm, Aoshi asked him, “will you come inside?”

Kenshin, facing down Aoshi alone, behind the double doors; what did he do, do you think?

**Author's Note:**

> On this episode of mouse ruins shit: Rurouni Kenshin
> 
> So I have very fond memories of reading Ruroken in middle school, my friend would let me borrow her copies, she would let me borrow exactly 1 volume at a time for exactly 1 class period, so I would have to read it during class and then give it back immediately because she didn't really trust me (which is fair). In this fashion I read at least ten volumes and fell DEEPLY in love with Kenshin to the point of adopting awkward third person pronouns in my speech that still pop up from time to time. ("well, mouse thinks...") I didn't know how to find ILLEGAL THINGS online so I read like half of Ruroken exactly once, couldn't get more, sadly moved on, and then spontaneously decided to reread it now, in the year of our lord 2020, and I was like
> 
> [ I like this](http://manganelos.com/rurouni-kenshin-chapter-115#18)
> 
> And then I wrote this whole thing based off of how deeply this one scene struck me. I had many questions. I wrote out these questions in a long list and turned them into shipfic. Look, I deeply believe in the inherent erotic potential of murder/suicides, so when Aoshi declared his very serious intent to revenge murder Kenshin and then kill himself on the spot, I feel in love kind of. 
> 
> As a final note I'm starting to regret not straight up naming this like after [Like a Stone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glO58_4sXWM) because this fic and this song are now so unfortunately bonded in my head that one always brings up the other; great.


End file.
